It is becoming increasingly important to companies and individuals that they can track items stored in warehouses or in transit, and preferably this is carried out electronically. Thus many goods and/or the pallets or packaging containing the goods, include a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag which can be a passive or active device. The active RFID tag includes an energy source, usually a long life battery, generally to augment the range of the tag, whereas the passive RFID tag depends entirely upon the reader for energy. The passive RFID requires a higher powered reader and has a shorter range, but is cheaper and does not require a battery. In general passive RFID tags are read only i.e. the RFID tag is encoded at the time of manufacture or application to an item and cannot be updated, whereas active RFID tags are often rewriteable. There is nothing that prevents a passive RFID tag from being rewriteable other than cost.
When the RFID tag is read by a reader the information is often transferred to a database which provides further information on the item tagged. These databases can be proprietary and therefore potentially do not accept, store or provide information in a generally accessible format. This can prevent the data from being used/accessed by other databases for legitimate purposes. In addition many proprietary databases were written before RFID tags were in common usage, and therefore they require modification before they allow RFID data to be automatically captured and processed.
One way of avoiding the cost to modify the database is to access the data on the RFID tag using a reader; this data is then manually entered onto the database. This can be time consuming and additionally increases the chance of data entry errors.
RFID tags and readers from one manufacturer may not be usable with another manufacturer's products, or worse still they may be partially compatible. This is in part due to the lack of the industry using a published standard for RFID tags. This can result in sites having to use more than one type of reader.
Once a shipment is in transit there is no way to read the RFID tag until it arrives at its destination; this can lead to shipments being lost or tampered with during transit. This tampering or loss can result in a financial cost to the shipper, manufacturer and/or customer; this cost is often not recoverable.